From several recent reports of the McKinsey Consulting Group and from mega research done by many of the leading education researchers in the world, there is one truth that we constantly try to avoid - the quality of teaching has the greatest influence on student learning outcomes. Class size, instructional method, resources, technology, you name it!!! Nothing matters more than quality of teaching.

I tell the story in presentations of the book my wife gave me on Valentine's Day in 2007 - Change or Die by Alan Deuschtman. This book details research on heart by-pass patients. When faced with certain death if they did not change stress levels, eating habits, and exercise habits, only 1 out of 9 patients were able to sustain meaningful change. So, that begs the question. If heart by-pass patients facing death cannot change, then how in the world can we expect teachers to change.

Don't believe me that quality of teaching matters? Do your own research. Talk to 10 adults and ask them during their school careers were there teachers who were poor quality and in whose class they learned or utilized very little of the content shared. Then ask them if their children had poor quality teachers. Bob Marzano relates it this way. Two children enter third grade scoring at the 50th percentile. One child has two great teachers for two years in a great school and scores at the 96th percentile. The other child has two poor quality teachers in a poor quality school for two years and scores at the 3rd percentile. Still not convinced, read Bill Sanders work from Tennessee.

What can we do about this? Number one admit that the colleges are probably sending us the best they have and that we must work with those we have rather than beg for new ones. Hire great principals and provide them with the training, coaching and support to recognize great instruction. Provide teachers with the training, coaching and support to develop into great teachers. Let the great teachers we have provide coaching, support and training on the job to the teachers who need help. Then monitor, monitor, monitor and evaluate.

This is not a short term fix. This is not an easy solution. It is the right solution for our children and our future. Good luck and let me know what you think!!!

This week I am attending the Quality New Mexico conference and will present several concurrent sessions and meet with the Strengthening Quality in Schools group for a short speech and question time. Last week, I spoke at a meeting of school superintendents in California. The top issue for everyone these days is budgeting in difficult times and how to spend less money without negatively impacting classrooms.

When asked questions about budget, I like to describe our zero-based budgeting process we use in our school system. Every year, we ask budget owners to start from scratch and define expenditures that need to be made and show how the expenditures are aligned with the strategic priorities of the school system and the goals of the strategic plan. We take the concept to the department improvement plan and school improvement plan level. Every improvement plan defines 2-3 improvement goals aligned with district goals. The improvement plan must show the strategy that will be used to make improvement. The improvement plan also requires development of a deployment plan that shows resources needed, person(s) responsible and evaluation indicators. What our improvement plan process does for our school system is to align the resources to the improvements we need that help us reach our strategic priorities. Of course, the top strategic priority is improving student learning outcomes. We were able to reduce expenditures this year by over $4 million without having a negative impact on classrooms. I also like to remind people that our school system is in the bottom 10 in NC for expenditures per pupil

Another side of the budget equation that many people tend to forget is revenue. In our school system we are constantly looking for innovation that might produce revenue. We have developed a leadership academy concept that produces revenue through training of other school systems. We are marketing on-line courses and on-line reading intervention programs to home-schoolers that is producing revenue. We are offering supplemental education services through No Child Left Behind to other school systems as a revenue producer. We are working with community partners to gain grants so that summer enrichment programs can be implemented to replace our traditional summer school. We are looking at every process to find efficiencies so that we can reduce operating cost. We have implemented LEED certified green schools to save operating costs in utilities.

While these are difficult times, the excitement of innovation is something that is always present in our school system. The Baldrige Criteria requires innovation and the Baldrige Award is the President's highest honor for performance excellence and INNOVATION. Our countries very survial will depend on our ability to be innovative and create the products that large economies like China and India will want in the future.

I am always amazed at educators. We are always looking for the silver bullet. What I know to be reality is that there are no silver bullets. If you want to improve education, you must improve the teaching and learning process that creates the results for student achievement. I watch as many school systems are always launching a new initiative. I see some new curriculum. A new on-line assessment system. A one-to-one lap project. A new software program. Incentive pay programs. The list is mindless and very expensive. But most of all, in the end, how does anyone really know whether something worked or it did not work.

In presentations, I always stress the importance of having a clearly defined process. In Baldrige, the words are Approach, Deployment, Learning and Integration. Approach means that the process is clearly defined with repeatable steps. Deployment means that the process is deployed and in our school system the key word is FIDELITY. We have process checklists or classroom walkthroughs that check for fidelity of deployment of key learning processes. This is where many school systems, teachers, and principals stop. You must continue forward to review the results from the process and go through improvement steps to make the process high performing. Once you have the process high performing, you may then look at integrating what you have learned across other processes within or outside your school or classroom.

I am excited to let readers know that there is much going on with process management and improvement in education. American Society for Quality offers many training opportunities. There is also an initiative just getting started with the American Productivity Quality Council. This initiative is entitled PMI (Process Management and Improvement). This initiative features the use of quality tools to identify key school/district processes and then learn how to manage and improve key processes. In these days of tight budgets, process management and improvement are more important than ever.

In our school system, a focus on process management and improvement has led the way to outstanding student academic results and outstanding results from support processes. The bottom line for our customers is that we are a Top Ten performing school system in North Carolina, however, our expenditures per pupil are among the lowest ten in North Carolina.

I will follow up with future blogs about process management and improvement and a keynote I am delivering at the ASQ Summer Leadership Institute in Florida will feature the latest on this work. However, if you want to know more .... e-mail me at tholliday@iss.k12.nc.us. In the meantime, select a process that needs improving and get to work. You will be amazed at what can be done with little to no cost when you have ADLI!!!!!

Given the difficult economic times that we find ourselves, I am certain that many school systems are working to reduce budgets. One of the first budget items to be reduced is usually professional development and travel. School superintendents are always quick to point out that the last place we want to impact is the classroom. However, quite often the reduction of professional development will certainly have long-term impacts on the classroom practices of teachers which in turn will have a negative impact on student learning.

With that said, it is very important that a school system have processes in place to measure the impact of professional development. In our school system we utilize software developed for that purpose. We can track the impact of professional development at several levels. We can determine the satisfaction of teachers and principals with a particular professional development course or workshop. We can then track to what degree the teacher or principal actually deployed the strategies from the professional development and we can monitor the level of fidelity with which the teacher or principal actually implemented the strategies. Finally, we measure the impact of the strategies on student learning or operational outcomes that the strategy was intended to impact. Through this methodology, we can actually see of the professional development strategies are providing our school system with a return on investment.

Speaking of investment, one of the best professional development activities for the money is the annual National Quality for Education Conference hosted by the American Society for Quality. I attend a lot of conferences and if I have to make budget decisions about which to eliminate, this will be the last one to eliminate. Why? The participation is a cross section of the country and the world. The participants include teachers, principals, central office administrators, school board members, college professors, and consultants. With this variety of participants, our school system can network with many school districts across the nation and identify possible benchmark school systems. We can hear concerns from the teacher level to the school board member level and find out possible solutions for the work we are doing. We like to send a team of participants from teacher to superintendent to ensure we get a variety of opinions about best practices and possible benchmark school systems. We have been attending the conference for at least 8 years and find the conference to be an important tool in our work with continuous improvement. I encourage readers to look at the 2009 conference to be held in Jacksonville, Florida in October, 2009. I hope to see you there.

Quite often I am asked about how to handle resistance from staff, leaders, and school board members when as superintendent or school principal you decide to inplement a strategic direction such as Baldrige, quality, continuous improvement, process management or whatever systemic approach to improving results you have decided to implement.

I would suggest reading Michael Fullan's most recent work - Six Secrets to Change. Of course there are many sources for this type of work, however, I find Fullan's work to be very insightful since he is actually engaged in the change management work in Canada and throughout the world. However, until you have a chance to read and formalize your own approach, I have a couple of suggestions.

Build relationships - as leader, you need to know your people and what drives them. Be visible an dopen up multiple methods of communication. When you ask someone to change the way they work, you will need to fall back on these relationships.

Establish clear expectations - start with asking people to act before inundating them with theory. In my experience the axiom that you get people to act their way into a new way of thinking much faster than you get them to think their way into a new way of acting.

Make certain to provide support and resources - nothing worse than to ask people to change the ways in which they work without support, coaching, and resources needed to do the work.

Track results as compared against fidelity of deployment - you need to know if people actually make changes you are asking them to make in the way that you are asking them to change. Also, you need to know if the change actually impacts student learning or operational results.

Be transparent about the results - If you get good results from good fidelity of deployment - great!! If you do not get good results then that is a great learning process. Transparency will ensure your relationships stay strong.

Good leaders today need to not only know what strategies will help improve results, they also must know how to manage change. You cannot do one without the other!!! Good luck!!!

Welcome to the first posting for this blog. The purpose behind this blog is to engage K-12 educators and other interested readers in a dialogue about improving K-12 education through leadership. Now many of you may think that leadership and improvement are an oxymoron, however, I hope to be able to persuade you to think and lead differently.

First of all, let me be clear. Iredell-Statesville Schools is a Baldrige district. We have been recognized at the state level with awards and at the national level through Baldrige National site visits. Recently we were notified that we would receive a site visit toward the end of October. I will blog about our experience with state and national site visits. However, the main purpose of the blog will be to talk about how leadership can drive improvement.

Today, I had lunch with Lee Jenkins who is one of AASA and ASQ well know authors and trainers for the use of Deming principles. Our school system has a 3 year plan to roll out training to all teachers and administrators in our system on how to use Lee's L to J method. Lee and I were talking about the true test of leadership - making certain the AIM is correct.

So... whether you are starting, in the middle, or well down the path of your continuous improvement journey, it is a good idea to look at the AIM first. Is your AIM focused on increasing the success of children and teachers or is your AIM focused on winning an award or recognition. Your AIM should appear in your ACTIONS. Our AIM in Iredell-Statesville Schools is to rigorously challenge ALL students to meet the challenges of the 21st century. Our vision is to ignite a passion for learning in students, staff, administrators and parents. Deming had it right - our true purpose in schools should be to increase successes and decrease failures. Every child comes to school with a yearning for learning and it is our job to make certain that we do not dampen that yearning for learning. As leaders, we must constantly remind teachers of that purpose and we need to constantly remind our administrators to not stamp out the yearning for learning in faculty and staff!!!

Feel free to visit our web page Iredell-Statesville Schools and check out what we are doing with continuous improvement and the Baldrige criteria. Also, please e-mail responses to the blog so we can truly create a national dialogue on continuous improvement in education through leadership.